Lady Macbeth tells her queasy husband, who is afraid of being too transparent: “Why, I can smile and murder while I smile.” And elsewhere she instructs him “to look like the innocent flower but be the serpent under it”. Her husband’s eventual victim ought to have known better. After all, experience had taught him “There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.”

The cynical exercise of power through dissimulation, cunning and sheer make-believe forms part of the manual of those who choose politics for their own profit and consider the common good to be another myth with which to distract their supporters from their real intent.

But any confidence trickster will admit there can be only so many times you repeat the same trick on the same people before the patterns and your own excessive confidence let you down.

We have seen the same trick played over and again on our country by the present government. Smiles are certainly not lacking. What is worse is that there is no conscience with which to temper them.

It goes beyond spinning. It is as though the government firmly believes that it can fake it until it makes it... or more cynically until the people believe it is making it... and sure enough the strategy can work for quite some time until bubbles burst and people discover the truth.

The Enemalta deal, through which we were supposed to have a new power station running by 2015, was thrown out the window. It was a con. Instead, we learnt that what had really been plotted was a deal with Azerbaijan that sealed us into 18 years of an energy umbilical cord in place of the liberating options secured by the interconnector to Sicily.

The installation of the new power station was financed on the back of security provided by the government, and its operation is sustained on the basis of committed procurement by Enemalta, no matter the market realities.

While we were looking at the smoke at the front of the stage, the smiling magician’s assistant was changing robes. But we would never see that.

The government also boasted about the hospitals deal: the sale of three of our hospitals to VGH, who were supposed to transform them to provide us with  a world-class health service.

We were never told who owns VGH, though suspicions abound. We were never told the commercial terms. We eventually found out to our shock that the hospitals were effectively given  away, since the price for the government to get them back would exceed by far any rent received.

A scandalous deal whichever way you choose to look at it.

But any confidence trickster will admit there can be only so many times you repeat the same trick on the same people before the patterns let you down

The real value to VGH was in the incredibly one-sided deal in its possession, which it appears to have now resold to more than make up for its hopeless performance while it held the contract.

The government itself has the audacity to tell us in that the persons who have acquired the hospitals from VGH are “the real thing”!

Whoever owns VGH has made significant money for nothing. What was to become of the excess cash? But we did not see as far as the back of the stage.

The same minister who has negotiated these deals has now moved to Air Malta and at the front of the stage is the old let’s-save-our-airline act. There’s still too much smoke and flashing lights to get a clear idea of what’s happening in the back. But something must be.

While on the subject of faking it, what about the infamous American University of Malta? A Jordanian investor meets the Prime Minister, impresses him within a minute, acquires a pristine ODZ area to set up a university that will swamp the south of Malta with hundreds of students milling around, not to mention academics lured to our country and giving up their careers elsewhere... and the end result?

Fewer students than you would find in a kindergarten class, and all the academics dismissed before their probationary period came to an end. Who will be teaching whom and what in this bizarre scenario?

You see, you don’t always make it when you fake it... you can also be found out.

My colleagues from the European Parliament who visited Malta a few weeks ago and reported on the government’s disdain for the rule of law saw through all the make-believe. No ‘artful dodger’ tricks worked. Ana Gomes, who belongs to the political family of the Malta Labour Party, would never be blinded by partisan considerations. The entire delegation sought the truth. Faking it does not make it with them.

Sooner or later, faking it does not make it with all those who are objective and level-headed irrespective of political opinions and traditional loyalties.

Francis Zammit Dimech is a Nationalist Party MEP.

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